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What should I ask Rebecca Kukla?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is her home page:
Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University
Also: amateur powerlifter and boxer and certified sommelier
I live in the middle of Washington, DC, with my 13-year-old son Eli and my two Portal-themed cats, Chell and Cube. My research focuses on social epistemology, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of language.
This interview is an excellent entry point into her thought and life, here is an excerpt from the introduction:
[Rebecca] talks about traveling the world with her nomadic parents, her father who was a holocaust survivor and philosopher, hearing the Dream argument in lieu of bedtime stories, chaotic exposure to religion, getting a job at and apartment at the age of 14, the queerness of Toronto, meeting John Waters and Cronenberg, her brother who is the world’s first openly transgender ordained rabbi, getting into ballet, combating an eating disorder, the importance of chosen family, co-authoring an article with her dad, developing an interest in philosophy of mathematics, the affordability of college in Canada, taking care of a disabled, dramatically uninsured loved one, going to University of Pitt for grad school, dealing with aggravated depression, working with Brandom, McDowell, the continental/analytic distinction, history of philosophy, how feminism and women—such as Tamara Horowitz, Annette Baier, and Jennifer Whiting–were treated at Pitt, coping with harassment from a member of the department, impostor syndrome, Dan Dennett and ‘freeedom’, her sweet first gig (in Vermont), dining with Bernie Sanders, spending a bad couple of years in Oregon, having a child, September 11th, securing tenure and becoming discontent at Carleton University, toying with the idea of becoming a wine importer, taking a sabbatical at Georgetown University which rekindled her love of philosophy, working on the pragmatics of language with Mark Lance, Mass Hysteria and the culture of pregnancy, how parenting informs her philosophy, moving to South Florida and the quirkiness of Tampa, getting an MA in Geography, science, philosophy and urban spaces, boxing, starting a group for people pursuing non-monogamous relationships, developing a course on Bojack Horseman, her current beau, Die Antwoord, Kendrick, Trump, and what she would do if she were queen of the world…
And from the interview itself:
I suspect that I’m basically unmentorable. I am self-destructively independent and stubborn, and deeply resentful of any attempt to control or patronize me, even when that’s not really a fair assessment of what is going on.
So what should I ask her?
How much do the experts wish to discount the future by?
…we find that expert opinion is particularly varied on the rate of time preference. The modal value is zero, in line with many prominent opinions. But with a median (mean) of 0.5 percent (1.1 percent)…
And:
…while we find that experts recommend placing greater weight on normative than positive issues when determining the SDR, most believe that the SDR should be informed by both.
That is from the latest issue of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, “Discounting Disentangled” by Drupp, Freeman, Groom, and Nesje. You will of course find a lengthy discussion of these issues in my own Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Gang update
From El Salvador (WSJ):
Politicians must ask permission of gangs to hold rallies or canvass in many neighborhoods, law-enforcement officials and prosecutors said. In San Salvador, the nation’s capital, gangs control the local distribution of consumer products, experts said, including diapers and Coca-Cola . They extort commuters, call-center employees, and restaurant and store owners. In the rural east, gangs threaten to burn sugar plantations unless farmers pay up.
At what point do we say the government has been replaced? On the analytics:
“We’ve left behind the era of the cartel and the kingpin,” said Alejandro Hope, a security consultant in Mexico City. “Today, most violence in Latin America is the result of a new system that’s more diverse, harder to control, and much more local.”
In Brazil to the south (NYT):
In Rio de Janeiro state alone, more than 5,197 people have been killed this year — far more than the 3,438 civilians killed in conflict last year in Afghanistan, according to United Nations figures.
One-quarter of those may have been killed by the state, a sign of state weakness not strength.
One approach is to view all this as a problem to be solved, and surely there is something to that attitude. Another approach, not mutually exclusive, is to view it as a problem that is getting harder to solve.
Amazon search is getting worse, especially for classic books
Just type in “Gulliver’s Travels,” and the first page will not show any editions you actually ought to buy. And there are so many sponsored ads for mediocre, copyright-less editions. If you type in “Gulliver’s Travels Penguin” you eventually will get to this, a plausible buy for the casual educated reader. And wouldn’t it be nice if someone told you the $156.31 Cambridge University Press edition is by far the best choice? — full of marginal annotations!
Monday assorted links
2. What is the epistemic power of genealogy?
3. The creative destruction of Polanyi and Marx? Hayek is doing OK.
4. Trump’s election made the EU more popular in Europe.
5. “Results suggest that terrorist groups increase the number of attacks they commit after a drone ‘hit’ on their
leader, compared to after a ‘miss’.”
Sunday assorted links
1. Heterodox Academy podcast with Charlotta Stern. And a related paper “Does political ideology hinder insights on gender and labor markets?”
2. “…exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 24 to 28 by 3 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains 5 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data,and that each year of exposure to a disruptive peer reduces the present discounted value of classmates’ future earnings by $80,000.” By Carrell, Hoekstra, and Kuka. The size of that effect seems large to me, but worth a ponder in any case.
3. Scott Adams on the persuasive powers of Trump.
4. “…struggling individuals were more motivated by giving advice than receiving it.”
5. Can tracking your moods with a wrist band stop your suicide? Should we even go down this path?
How are immigrants and refugees in Sweden doing?
We use administrative Swedish data to show that, conditional on parent income, immigrant children have similar incomes and higher educational attainment in adulthood than native-born Swedes. This result, however, masks the fact that immigrant children born into poor families are more likely than similar natives to both reach the top of the income distribution and to stay at the bottom. Immigrant children from high-income families are also more likely than natives to regress to the economic bottom. Notably, however, children from predominantly-refugee sending countries like Bosnia, Syria, and Iran have higher intergenerational mobility than the average immigrant child in Sweden.
That paper, co-authored with Cristina Bratu, is from Valentin Bolotnyy, who is on the job market from Harvard. Here is my post on his job market paper.
MR sentences to ponder
Also, I finally had a chance to meet Tyler Cowen and tell him that his blog played a bit part in how I ended up dating my now-wife. Back when we were messaging on OKCupid (to clarify: my wife and I were messaging; I have not contacted Tyler Cowen on OKC), I wanted to establish my Internet-nerd bona fides, so I mentioned that I’d been linked by a prominent economics blog. She mentioned that she had been linked by a very prominent economics blog. It was Marginal Revolution, both times. (Her post: on taking oneself seriously. My post is lost to history, but I believe it was about the causes and consequences of onion futures being illegal.)
Since Cowen is an expert on many topics, it should come as no surprise that he’s an export on MR lore, so he informed me that at least one couple has gotten married on the site. One economic story you can tell about the last hundred or so years is that, as economies globalize, we compete head-to-head with more people, and need to define our domains ever more narrowly if we hope to be #1. Apparently “used Marginal Revolution to get married” was, in fact, far too broad a domain for me to have any hope of excelling.
That is from Byrne Hobart, with the essay mostly on his recent visit to Bloomberg and the Bloomberg AI panel.
Saturday assorted links
1. Educational markets in everything.
2. Is sex binary?
3. Profile of Agnes Gund (NYT). This article, ostensibly about Gund, is the best profile of the NYT I have seen in ages.
5. Good guys in superhero films are more violent than the villains.
Friday assorted links
1. Sexual assault in North Korea.
2. Different academics pick the most influential book of the last twenty years.
3. “…we show that regions close to historical missionary settlements exhibit higher likelihood of HIV. This effect is driven by the Christian population in our sample. This suggests conversion to Christianity as a possible explanatory channel. Our findings are robust to alternative specifications addressing selection.” Link here (pdf).
Are peaceful or violent protests more effective?
Are peaceful or violent protests more effective at achieving policy change? I study the effect of protests during the Civil Rights Era on legislator votes in the US House. Using a fixed-effects specification, my identifying variation is changes within the congressional district over time. I find that peaceful protests made legislators vote more liberally, consistent with the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. By contrast, violent protests backfired and made legislators vote more conservatively. The effect of peaceful protests was limited to civil rights-related votes. The effect of violent protests extended to welfare-related votes. I explore alternative explanations for these results and show that the results are robust to them. Congressional districts where incumbents were replaced responded more strongly. Furthermore, congressional districts with a larger population share of whites responded more strongly. This is consistent with a signaling model of protests where protests transmitted new information to white voters but not to black voters.
That is the abstract of the job market paper of Gábor Nyéki from Duke.
Smell markets in everything
Previously, she has made dairy products from the perspiration of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Here is the full article. And:
In one exhibition, [Sissel] Tolaas captured the armpit sweat of severely anxious men from Greenland to China, recreated their individual smells and painted them onto the walls of the installation. (“There was a composite odor of anxiety that just infused the whole room, and it was really unhinging,” said Howes, who saw it in Basel, Switzerland). After the smell of fear, Tolaas recreated the smell of violence from cage fighters in East London. She has recreated the scents of Berlin’s famed Berghain nightclub, New York’s Central Park in October, World War I, communism and the ocean. Her shows are immersive and emotional in a distracted world. They aim to grip audiences right by the lizard brain.
And:
Tolaas also invented 1,500 “smell memory kits” — abstract odors that have never been smelled before. When you want to remember an event, you open the amulet and inhale, sealing the moment in your emotional core. For the London Olympics, she made a Limburger cheese sourced from David Beckham’s sweaty socks, which was served to VIPs.
File under “Department of Why Not?”
My Bloomberg column on Harvard and Asian-American admissions
Here is the column, here is one bit:
I attended Harvard (for my doctorate in economics), and most of the people there are as well-meaning as any you might find in Idaho or West Virginia.
And:
Step back from the emotions of the current debate and start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another.
And:
The collateral damage on Asian-American applicants is psychologically minimized and explained away as a problem that can only be remedied over time.
And:
Few societies have methods of assuring cultural continuity that could be revealed transparently without causing at least some outrage or scandal… It is no accident that Harvard has strenuously resisted disclosing the methods of its admission processes.
Get the picture? By the way:
In the meantime, the elites will do everything possible to protect the system, co-opt the opposition, and make a mix of symbolic and real concessions…You will recognize these elites by their apologies, their attempts to shift the focus back to African-American issues, and their unwillingness to entertain fundamental change.
Thursday assorted links
1. My podcast on Economic Growth, Liberalism, and Philosophy, with Zack Baker of Berkeley.
2. Why Harvard (and David Card) is wrong: “But given that these factors are themselves correlated with race, Mr Card’s argument is statistically rather like saying that once you correct for racial bias, Harvard is not racially biased.”
3. One-day Fight Club for preschoolers, in St. Louis, captured on video.
4. Elena Ferrante and the HBO adaptation (NYT).
5. The new Rubb/Sumner Principles textbook, business orientation, consolidated micro/macro, if I understand correctly.
6. Dwarsliggers (NYT).
Wednesday assorted links
1. Cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes.
2. No Coase theorem: “Opinion polls show more than 50 per cent of Greeks oppose the June deal because the government controversially accepted the existence of Macedonian ethnicity and language in return for the change of name.” FT link.
3. Chocolate is older than we had thought.
4. The world’s Scrabble champion in French cannot speak French (NYT).
6. David Card vs. Peter S. Arcidiacono. Good piece, Card is wrong.